Urban Change and the Right to the City
Level:
Master's CEU credits:
2 ECTS credits:
4 Academic year:
2009/2010 Semester:
Fall Start and end dates:
7 Aug 2009 Co-hosting Unit(s) [if applicable]:
Stream/Track/Specialization/Core Area:
Social and Political History in a Comparative Perspective CEU Instructor(s):
Judit Bodnár Additional information:
Parallel to these themes and emphases runs the introduction of the conceptual staples of urban studies from a critical perspective interrogating the biases of urban theory, which has privileged the modern European city. The course is therefore comparative temporally, spatially and conceptually. There is no prerequisite for the class but you are expected to have some background in the social sciences and a willingness to read and think beyond your discipline.
This is not a lecture course or a free-floating seminar; rather, a genre in-between—a seminar with structured summaries and background information provided by the instructor. Active and informed participation is essential and will count as part of your grade. Each of you will be asked to initiate a class discussion at least once, which should not be a mere summary of the readings but a problem-oriented analysis of the themes of the class, or a further explication of a theme of your choice (from among the topics of the week) that relies on additional sources. Depending on class size, it can also be a group project. Learning Outcomes:
You are expected
• to form a theoretically and historically grounded understanding of contemporary urban change;
• to identify both the forces that generate similar conditions and those producing difference in urban restructuring;
• to see the city both as a collective enterprise and a divided one;
• to develop serious doubts to the generality of urban theory;
• to stop thinking that every city is inferior to Paris yet understand why we all tend to think so;
• to go beyond your own region, and place it in a broader framework;
• to go beyond your discipline and see how the framing of urban questions varies with your starting point, and how a par excellence multi-disciplinary area, urban studies, can be approached;
• and finally to go beyond your politics and challenge your ‘natural’ use and claims to urban space as well as ideas of what the ‘good’ city should be like. Assessment :
You are required to write a term paper, approximately 4000 words. It can be a critical analysis of an aspect of urban life, the politics of urban space, recent changes in a city of your choice relying on urban theory gained from the readings, or a study of theoretical and methodological issues of comparing urban change across time and space. Other genres that deal with the city in a novel and intelligent way also qualify. You are to hand in the title of the paper along with a 100-word abstract by the sixth class. Papers are due by the last class. Assessment Your grade is a combination of 3 elements: class participation (30%), term paper (40%) and in-class presentation (30%). Full description:
Week 1. Introduction + class organization + film screening
Contemporary urbanity at/from different places: Bombay, New York, Moscow, Mexico City
Megacities (dir. Michael Glawogger, 1998, 90 min)
Week 2. Constructing the modern city: the garden and the workshop
Central European urban modernity and imaginaries in two cities: Budapest and Vienna
Carl Schorske: Fin-de-siècle Vienna: politics and culture. Vintage, 1981. “The Ringstrasse, Its Critics, and the Birth of Urban Modernism” Pp. 24-115. [
pdf]
Peter Hanak: The garden and the workshop: essays on the cultural history of Vienna and Budapest. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998. “Urbanization and Civilization” Pp. 3-43. [pdf] Recommended: “The Garden and the Workshop” Pp. 63-97.
David Frisby: “Streets, Imaginaries and Modernity: Vienna is not Berlin” Pp.21-57 in Gyan Prakash and K.M Kruse (eds.) The Spaces of the Modern City. Princeton. [pdf]
Recommended:
Donald J. Olsen: The City as a Work of Art. London, Paris, Vienna. Yale, 1986.
John Lukacs: Budapest 1900: a historical portrait of a city and its culture. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988. Pp. 3-107.
Ákos Moravánszky: Competing Visions: Aesthetic Invention and Social Imagination in Central European Architecture, 1867-1918. MIT Press. 1997. Especially Ch 1 & 2 “The identity of an imaginary region”; “The City as Political Monument” Pp. 1-62.
Peter Lengyel: Cobblestone. A Detective Novel: A philosophical mystery for the Millennium. Readers international, 1993 [1988].
Week 3. Living among strangers: the urban predicament, public space, its brief history and theory, and more comparisons
Georg Simmel: “Metropolis and Mental Life” Pp. 324-39 in Donald Levine (ed. and intro.) Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago, 1971. [1903]
Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske: “Budapest and New York Compared” Pp. 1-28 in Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske (eds.): Budapest and New York: studies in metropolitan transformation, 1870-1930. Russell Sage, New York, 1994.
Gábor Gyáni: “Uses and Misuses of Public Space in Budapest: 1873-1914” Pp. 85-107 in Budapest and New York.
Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rosenzweig: “The Park and the People: Central Park and Its Publics: 1850-1910” Pp. 108-134 in Budapest and New York.
Recommended:
Richard Sennett: The Fall of Public Man. Norton, 1974. Esp. Pp 130-49. Ch. 7 “The impact of industrial capitalism on public life”
Elizabeth Wilson: The Sphinx in the City. Urban Life, the Control of Disorder and Women. California, 1992.
Olsen, The City as a Work of Art. ”The city as playground” Pp. 189-248.
Week 4. The measure of modern urbanity: Paris restructured
The history and theory of the city’s transformation
Walter Benjamin: “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century” Pp. 46-57 in Philip Kasinitz (ed.) Metropolis: center and symbol of our time. New York: New York University Press, 1995.
David Harvey: “Paris 1850-70” Pp. 63-220 in Harvey: Consciousness and the Urban Experience. Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization. JHU Press, Baltimore, 1975.
Recommended:
Donald J. Olsen, The City As a Work of Art. Pp. 35-57.
Eugen Weber: France, fin de siecle. Belknap, 1986. Chapters on Paris.
Paul Rabinow: French Modern. Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Chicago, 1995 [1989]
Week 5. Colonial urban modernity: dual city, the transfer of urban forms, colonialism and capitalism
Leo Ou-fan Lee: “Shanghai Modern: Reflections on Urban Culture in China in the 1930s” Pp. 86-122 in Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (ed.) Alternative Modernities. Duke, 2001.
Janet Abu-Lughod: “Tale of Two Cities: The Origins of Modern Cairo” Comparative Studies in Society and History 7, 4 (July 1965): 429-57.
Anthony D. King: “Colonialism, Urbanism, and the Capitalist World Economy” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 13, 1 (1989): 1-18.
Sheila Crane: “Architecture at the Ends of Empire: Urban Reflections between Algiers and Marseille” Pp. 99-143 in Prakash and Kruse (eds.) The Spaces of the Modern City.
Recommended:
Gwendolyn Wright: The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism. Chicago, 1991.
Short version: Gwendolyn Wright: “Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in French Colonial Policy, 1900-1930” Pp. 322-45 in Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper (eds.) Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. California, 1997.
Zeynep Çelik: Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontation. Algiers under French Rule. California, 1997.
Week 6. Constructing difference: the socialist city
The ‘socialist city’ as ideology, utopia, development project and state strategy, and the little tactics of the habitat
R. A. French and F. E. Ian Hamilton: “Is There a Socialist City?” Pp. 1-21 in French and Hamilton (eds.) The socialist city: spatial structure and urban policy. Wiley, Chichester, 1979.
Ivan Szelenyi. “Urban Development and Regional Management in Eastern Europe” Theory and Society 10 (1981): 169-205.
Stephen Kotkin: Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. California, 1997.
Chapter 3 “The idiocy of urban life” Pp. 106-45.
Chapter 6 “Bread and Circus” Pp.238-279.
Recommended:
Judit Bodnar: “Constructing Difference: Western versus Non-Western, Capitalist versus Socialist Urban Logic” Pp. 13-34 in Bodnar: Fin de Millénaire Budapest: Metamorphoses of Urban Life. Minnesota, 2001.
David Harvey: Social Justice and the City. Ch 6 “Urbanism and the city—an interpretive essay” Pp. 195-284.
Kotkin, Chapter 2 then the rest.
Gordon Church: “Bucharest: Revolution in the Townscape Art” Pp. 493-506 in French and Hamilton, The Socialist City.
Film: Budapest Retro (dir. by Gabor Zs. Papp, 1998)
Week 7. The specter of community and good life in and outside the city: (sub)urban utopias
Places and spaces of utopia, urbanization, suburbanization, class exclusion
Herbert J. Gans: “Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of Life: A Reevaluation of Definitions” in Gans: People, Plans and Policies, New York, 1991. Reprinted in Kasinitz, 170-95.
Robert Fishman: Bourgeois Utopias. The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. Basic Books, 1987.
Chapter 2: “Building the Bourgeois Utopia” Pp. 39-72.
Kenneth Jackson: Crabgrass Frontier. The Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford, 1985.
Chapter 11: “Federal Subsidy and the Suburban Dream: How Washington Changed the American Housing Market” Pp. 190-218.
David Harvey: “The Spaces of Utopia” Pp. 133-81 in Spaces of Hope. California, 2000.
John Friedmann: “The Good City: In Defense of Utopian Thinking” Pp. 103-18 in Friedmann, The Prospect of Cities. Minnesota, 2002.
Recommended:
Harvey, Jackson, Fishman, full books
James Holston. 1989. The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília. Chicago.
Week 8. Pathways of global urban restructuring
Globalization, global cities and the new urban hierarchy, neoliberalism, postsocialism and the rule of informality
David Harvey: “Postmodernism in the city: architecture and urban design” Pp. 66-98 in The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the origins of Cultural Change. Basil Blackwell, 1989.
Judit Bodnar: Fin de Millénaire Budapest: Metamorphoses of Urban Life. Minnesota, 2001.
“Posted: Socialism, Modernity, State” Pp. 1-12
“Assembling the Square” Pp. 103-28.
Saree Makdisi: “Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere” Critical Inquiry 23 (Spring 1997): 661-705.
AbdouMaliq Simone: “Emergency Democracy and the “Governing Composite” Social Text 26, 2 (2008): 13-22.
Recommended:
Saskai Sassen: The Global City. New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, 1991.
Neil Brenner: New State Spaces. Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. Oxford, 2004.
Matthew Gandy: “Learning from Lagos” New Left Review 33 (May-June, 2005).
AbdouMaliq Simone: For the City Yet to Come. Changing African Life in Four Cities. Duke, 2004.
Visual reading: György Klösz and László Lugosi Lugo: Budapest 1900 / 2000. Budapest, 2001.
Week 9. The right to the city
New forms of urban marginality, and the right to the city as minimal and maximal program: from participation to the right of radical imagination and change
Henri Lefebvre: “The right to the city” Pp. 147-59 in Lefebvre, Writings of Cities. Selected, translated and introduced by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Blackwell, 1996.
Saskia Sassen: Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims” Public Culture 8 (1996): 205-223.
François Maspero: Roissy Express. A Journey Through the Paris Suburbs. Photographs by Anaïk Frantz. Translated by Paul Jones. Verso, 1994 [1990]. Pp. 154-205.
Loïc Wacquant: “Urban Outcasts: Stigma and Division in the Black American Ghetto and the French Urban Periphery” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17, 3 (1993): 366-83.
Partha Chatterjee: “The Politics of the Governed” Pp. 53-78 in The Politics of the Governed. Columbia, 2004.
Recommended:
David Harvey: “The Right to the City” New Left Review 53 (2008).
Engin F. Işin: “Citizenship” in Ray Hutchison (ed.): Encyclopedia of Urban Studies. London: Sage. Forthcoming. (6 pgs)
Alejandro Portes: “Immigration and the Metropolis: Reflections on Urban History” Journal of International Migration Research 1, 2 (Spring 2000): 153-75.
Arjun Appadurai: “Deep Democracy” Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics” Public Culture 14 (2002): 21-47.
Teresa Caldeira and James Holston: “Democracy and Violence in Brazil” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, 4 (October 1999): 691-729.
Film: Hate (dir. by Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995)
Week 10. Uneven development on the urban scale and beyond
Mike Davis: “Fear and Money in Dubai” New Left Review 41 (2006): 47-68.
Judit Bodnar: “Dual Cities, Globalization and Uneven Development” Ms.
Neil Smith: “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy” Pp. 80-103 in Neil Brenner & Nik Theodore (eds.) Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe. Blackwell, 2002.
Neil Smith: “The Satanic Geographies of Globalization: Uneven Development in the 1990s” Public Culture 10, 1 (1997): 169-89.
Recommended:
Neil Smith. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. 2nd edition. Blackwell, 1990.
Kamran A. Ali and Martina Rieker: “Urban Margins” Introduction. Social Text 26, 2 (2008): 1-12.
Mike Davis: “Planet of Slums” New Left Review 26 (March – April) 2004 or book by same title, Verso, 2006.
Week 11. The landscapes of power: gentrification, defensible architecture, theme parks, and the new philosophy of public space
Mike Davis: “Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space” Pp. 154-80 in Michael Sorkin (ed.) Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. Hill & Wang, 1992.
Sharon Zukin: Landscapes of Power. From Detroit to Disney World. California, 1991.
“Gentrification, Cuisine, and the Critical Infrastructure: Power and Centrality Downtown” Pp. 179-215.
Don Mitchell and Lynn A. Staeheli: “Clean and Safe? Property Redevelopment, Public Space, and Homelessness in Downtown San Diego” Pp.143-75 in Setha Low and Neil Smith (eds.) The Politics of Public Space. New York, London: Routledge, 2006.
Xuefei Ren: “Forward the Past: Historical Preservation in Globalizing Shanghai” City & Community 7, 1 (2008): 23-43.
Teresa Caldeira: “Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation” Public Culture 8, 2 (1996): 303-28.
Recommended:
Neil Smith: The New Urban Frontier. Gentrification and the Revanchist City. Routledge, 1996.
Judit Bodnar: “Becoming Bourgeois: (Postsocialist) Utopias of Isolation and Civilization” Forthcoming in Mike Davis and Daniel Monk (eds.) Evil Paradises: The Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism. New York: New Press.
Fulong Wu: “The Global and local Dimensions of Place-making: Remaking Shanghai as a World City” Urban Studies 37, 8 (2000): 1359-77.
Teresa Caldeira: City of Walls. Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paolo. California, 2000.
Setha Low and Neil Smith (eds.) The Politics of Public Space. New York, London: Routledge, 2006.
Week 12. Place, memory and urban reconstruction: whose history, memory and city?
Dolores Hayden: The power of place: urban landscapes as public history. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995. Ch 1 & 2. Pp. 2-43.
Andreas Huyssen: “The Voids of Berlin” Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 57-81.
Recommended:
Christine Boyer: The City of Collective Memory. Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments. MIT, 1998. Especially Chapters 1 & 2, Pp. 1-70.
Peter Marcuse: “Reflections on Berlin. The meaning of reconstruction and the construction of meaning” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22, 2 (1998): 331-8.
Scott Campbell: “Capital reconstruction and capital accumulation in Berlin. A reply to Marcuse” IJURR 23, 1 (1999): 173-79.
Hartmut Häussermann: “Economic and political power in Berlin. A reply to Peter Marcuse” IJURR 23, 1 (1999) 180-84.
Film: Berlin Babylon. (dir. H. Siegert, 2001)